1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to distributed processing of images. The present invention is more particularly related to a system and method for distributing multipage optical character recognition processing among Multi-Functional Peripherals (MFPs) in a self-organizing computing cluster.
2. Description of the Related Art
MFPs are peripheral devices that perform multiple document-centric functions, typically scanning, copying, printing, and faxing. MFPs usually have networking capabilities and businesses typically have tens or hundreds of MFP hosts on the same network.
An MFP is commonly used to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on documents that are scanned into it or transmitted to it. A general overview of OCR is discussed in Sami Lais, QuickStudy: Optical Character Recognition, ComputerWorld, on the world wide web at computerworld.com/s/article/73023/Optical_Character_Recognition, which is incorporated herein by reference. OCR generally refers to the capability of a computer software to translate images containing words into a format that a person can use, for example, edit, retrieve, search, index, and/or store. To OCR refers to the act of the computer converting an image into the format that the person can use, such as electronically translating images into machine-readable text.
These images might be hand-written or printed text, or other machine-readable representations of data such as a barcode. OCR processing is typically resource-intensive on the MFP, so users who attempt OCR on a large multipaged document must often wait tens of seconds or minutes for the job to complete. This wait time often blocks the MFP from use by others as well.